"Less is more" is not necessarily a principle one associates with guitar improvisor extraordinaire Fred Frith, but on this duo session with harpist Shelley Burgon, the frequently voluble free-music shredder plies his trade with a simple acoustic guitar alongside Burgon's graceful harp on 12 tracks of finely wrought music.

I especially enjoyed Frith's use of strumming, a simple, basic technique that beginners and na�ve artists use almost exclusively, but here is engaged in with marvellously varied rhythmic results, whether articulating full chords, or simple riff-like motifs on a single string. An example comes in the mesmerizing detuned low-string guitar strumming that makes "Shaking Trees" a kind of programmatic sound poem, especially with the pizzicato harp punctuations that Burgon sustains through most of the piece.

The guitar is also exploited for its percussive sounds, as we often hear most evidently in idiomatic traditions like Flamenco and Latin American music. In counterpoint to Frith's artistry is Burgon's own, profoundly steeped in the language of the harp, which is not far off from acoustic guitar, the latter being, in some senses an echo of the other.

Further examples of the variety worth citing are the minimalistic "Resolution," replete with isolated, pointillistic sounds produced by scraping and hammering, and "Adventures in Red," a track that sounds at first a little like Spanish classical guitar but turns into a gossamer vortex of sound as Burgon gently throttles her harp and Frith articulates some oriental-sounding pentatonics.

A melismatic, Arabic-tinged short closing track "Right Behind You" shows yet another facet of the artistry on display on this release which, it must be repeated, is most impressive for its variety and the imaginative interplay of these two sympathetically minded musicians.